Vote fraud alert: The “snowbird vote” takes wing

Election watchdog group True the Vote has referred 31 cases of absentee ballot fraud in Florida and New York to the authorities, and says it’s “just the tip of the iceberg.” But remember, according to all the people who think common-sense voter identification measures are nothing but racist programs to suppress the minority vote, vote fraud never actually happens – it’s so rare that there’s no reason to even discuss it.

“This is further evidence of just how susceptible our election system is to voter fraud,” said True the Vote president Catherine Engelbrecht. “Earlier this year, Pew Research found more than 2.75 million people nationwide are registered to vote in more than one state. These early findings put a name, face and potential motivation behind that startling statistic. True The Vote calls on Florida, New York and federal officials to investigate and confirm our citizen research.”

What they’ve discovered is known as “snowbird voting”: people with residences in both New York and Florida who illegally voted in both states. There’s nothing complicated about how True the Vote found these snowbird votes. They simply compared the voter registration rolls of the two states, found 1,700 people registered to vote in both, and then discovered 31 of them had mailed absentee ballots from both Florida and New York during the same election cycle.

All of these double votes are violations of both federal and state law. It seems more than a little odd that election officials aren’t already performing such elementary integrity checks on their own. Let’s see how aggressively Eric Holder’s Justice Department prosecutes these clear cases of voter suppression, in which the votes of black American women are canceled out by fraudulent double votes. (I see no reason not to assume that every voter disenfranchised by fraud is black and female, since vote fraud defenders are constantly slapping the race card down on the table. I threw in “female” because I don’t like to sit down to a card game without upping the ante.)

Something similar happened in Arizona, where nine cases of double voting were discovered in the 2008 election. All of these discoveries highlight one of the reasons it’s time to sweep aside the foolish and disingenuous arguments from critics of voter identification, and use all of our Information Age resources to clean up our voter registrations rolls, and properly identify all voters at the time ballots are cast: it takes a long time to catch these false votes after the fact, and it doesn’t make much difference when they’re discovered months and years later.

“If an election ever came down to someone [winning] by one or two votes, and we could find that someone had voted multiple times – it would be hard to imagine that we could find those things fast enough to make a difference in that election,” said Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, as quoted by KJZZ News. “Which is why we want to make sure that people know that we’re checking for this, and that we don’t want them voting twice in this upcoming election.”

This is also one of the big reasons behind the push for early voting, and all those crazy polls you’re seeing that put Obama up by double-digits in battleground states, fabricated with huge Democrat oversamples. Early voting means more opportunities for fraud, and it also gives the media a chance to decide the election in early voters’ minds, using cooked polls.

Early voting begins tomorrow in Iowa. Almost a third of votes in 2008 were cast early, and even more early votes will be cast in 2012. Talking Points Memo notes that early voting percentages “were much higher in battleground states like Florida (51.8 percent), Nevada (66.9 percent), and North Carolina (60.6 percent).” The state of Ohio is sending absentee ballot request forms to every voter in the state. Early voting begins on October 2 in Ohio… the day before the first presidential debate.

A lot of people are going to vote before they see anyof the much-anticipated presidential debates. This re-shaped electoral landscape will always favor Democrats, because no Republican campaign can ever hope to compete with biased media efforts to shape the electorate’s mood during late September and early October. The notion of allowing anyone to vote before watching a single presidential debate is absurd.

And it’s producing a sea of absentee ballots that are highly susceptible to abuse. Back in 2008, WHIO News in Ohio found 3,000 dead people registered to vote, and “approximately 22 of them voted from beyond the grave.” Amazingly, until May of this year, Ohio only had access to the records of people who died in Ohio for the purposes of purging the dead from its rolls. Whatever zombie voters remain in the system are about to get absentee ballot request forms, which they can fill out while snowbird double voters soar through the crisp autumn skies overhead.